Ramon Tikaram in The Night is Darkest Before Dawn, the only sub-play to offer any hope. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

If there were any doubt about the Tricycle's status as Britain's foremost political theatre, it is silenced by this mind-blowing achievement. Nicolas Kent and his team have commissioned 12 half-hour plays which make up The Great Game and which cover Afghan history from 1842 to the present. Over the next few weeks they will be accompanied by films, exhibitions and discussions. And, having seen the dozen core dramas, which can be viewed either on a single day or separate evenings, two things strike me.

One is that they fulfil a basic function of art by instructing delightfully. The other is that, rather than pursuing an editorial line, they give us the information to allow us to make up our own minds about Afghanistan's future.

What is fascinating is how certain themes echo through the plays. In Stephen Jeffreys' deeply moving Bugles At The Gates of Jalalbad, which kicks off proceedings, we are reminded of the unwinnable nature of Afghan wars. As Rick Warden's Hendrick, one of four beleaguered buglers stranded after the British army's massive defeat at Kabul in 1842, remarks: "This country is a deathtrap for foreign armies."

And that idea recurs in David Edgar's equally fine Black Tulips, which shows how the Soviet troops who occupied the country from 1979 to 1989 learned the same bitter lesson: that "the Afghan people have never accepted occupation by foreigners with guns".

But Afghan intransigence has never prevented outsiders seeking to impose their own concept of order. The tragic irony of this is best shown in my own favourite among the plays: Ron Hutchinson's Durand's Line. In this we see Michael Cochrane as the British diplomat Mortimer Durand, locking horns with Paul Bhattacharjee's ruling emir in 1893. Durand naively believes that maps define nations and that, by creating fixed borders, the Russians can be kept at bay. In return the Afghans will enjoy a monopoly of the opium trade. It is a defining historical moment and a symbol of the endless desire for intervention. And that play is neatly juxtaposed with Amit Gupta's Campaign, which wittily shows a modern Foreign Office politician pushing, with equal simplicity, the dream of turning Afghanistan into a secular liberal democracy.

What becomes clear throughout the plays is that Afghanistan's tragedy stems as much from geography as history. And the failure of America, especially, to grasp local realities emerges time and again. In JT Rogers' brilliant Blood and Gifts, an undercover American emissary supplies an anti-Soviet 1980s warlord with arms only to learn too late that he has been aiding the Islamist cause. A similar point is made, more diffusely, in Ben Ockrent's Honey, which implies that American failure to read the situation led to the collapse of Kabul to the Taliban in 1996 and ultimately to the horrors of 9/11.

These plays, however, are not simply an attack on blundering western incomprehension. They also demonstrate the horrors of Taliban rule. In Colin Teevan's chilling The Lion of Kabul, Lolita Chakrabarti's UN representative impotently confronts a rigidly inflexible Taliban ruler, and in David Greig's Miniskirts of Kabul we are reminded of the horrific death of the pro-communist President Najibullah at the hands of the fundamentalists. Almost the only play that sounds a note of hope is Abi Morgan's The Night is Darkest Before the Dawn, set in the Kandahar countryside in 2002, which suggests that education and female enfranchisement will counter years of oppression.

The big question is what happens next. The Great Game, jointly directed by Nicolas Kent and Indhu Rubasingham assisted by Rachel Grunwald, offers no solutions. But it gives us an historical context in which to discuss the issues.

In the final play by Simon Stephens, Canopy of Stars, we are reminded of the impossibly difficult choices that lie ahead. Tom McKay as a British sergeant returning from Helmand province is confronted by Jemima Rooper as his angry wife begging him not to go back. "You are changing nothing," she tells him. To which he replies with a story about a 10-year-old girl at Delaram whose eyes were sprayed with acid for the simple offence of going to school.

And that, in a way sums up the virtue of The Great Game. It reminds us of all the past blunders in Afghanistan. At the same time, it does not spare us examples of present-day Taliban cruelty.

It is up to each individual to decide whether they feel Nato forces should stay or go. But these plays give us the chance to make an informed judgment. And I can only salute the entire cast, including Ramon Tikaram, Vincent Ebrahim, Daniel Betts and Jemma Redgrave, and the design of Pamela Howard and Miriam Nabarro. Something remarkable is happening at the Tricycle, where Afghan history and culture are being made manifest in a uniquely challenging, theatrically exciting way.